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Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #49: Evil Dead 2


What do you get when you mix buckets of fake blood, creative camera operators, the humour of the Three Stooges, and a man with the most recognizable chin in Hollywood? You get Evil Dead II (1987), the horror classic that somehow manages to remake the original in the first 15 minutes and yet feel entirely original. Even though it is mostly set in a cabin in the woods, that staple location in the horror genre, it feels like a roller coaster ride. This is especially true once the film's hero, the scrappy Ash Williams, embraces the madness by arming himself with a sawed-off shotgun and attaching a chainsaw where his hand used to be. "Groovy" indeed.

This gore-soaked franchise has had a long run, starting off with one low-budget movie directed by a young Sam Raimi and then growing into two sequels, a remake, comic books and a TV show with three seasons. My starting point was the third entry, Army of Darkness, which moves the action to the Middle Ages with the same amount of zaniness fans had come to expect. I then got to Evil Dead II during a double feature organized by the film club at the University of Sherbrooke. My only regret is that there weren't more people in attendance because this is a movie that requires an audience to shriek at the violence and then laugh at said violence with it becomes so over the top you can't do anything except laugh. 

As mentioned, the action starts the same way as many other horror movies, with Ash (Campbell) and his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) heading to a cabin in the woods for the weekend. In fact, this is the exact same thing that happened in The Evil Dead, only that first chapter had zero laughs and all the deaths. I don't know how Sam Raimi came up with the concept of remaking his own movie and still calling it a sequel but somehow it works. It doesn't take long for Ash to discover the Necronomicon, the book of the dead, and raise all sorts of hell that end up killing Linda. More accurately, the evil from the book possesses Sheila and Ash then must kill her in self-defence rather brutally. That would be the end except the evil is just beginning to toy with Ash.

As the dark and stormy night progresses, many interesting things happen in that cabin that required the work of many set designers, camera operators, the special effects department, and a very game Bruce Campbell. Light bulbs are filled with blood, a moose head starts talking, the furniture keeps slamming into Ash and his hand gets possessed. The obvious solution is to cut it off with a chainsaw, but the cursed hand then starts attacking him like an evil version of the hand from the Addams Family. And this is all before more people show up at the cabin to provide even more guts to be flayed around.

The film's success since its release can be attributed to some very hard-working people. There is Sam Raimi and writer Scott Spiegel who came with all this insanity in the first place. There is Raimi's brother Ted who was buried in makeup to portray one of the possessed victims. Then of course there is Bruce Campbell who for better or for worse is forever associated with the character of Ash Williams and his bravado in the face of danger. This actor has never won an Oscar, but how many Oscar winners have to carry a whole movie during which they are flown through the woods, have to act possessed, pretend to lose their sanity, have gallons of blood thrown in their face, and then look like the ultimate bad ass while armed with a chainsaw and a shotgun? I have yet to see Ryan Gosling do something like this.

Horror movies used to scare me but today I can both enjoy the horror of a movie like Evil Dead II and laugh at the bloody slapstick humour despite all the gruesome deaths. I'm pretty much all caught up with the saga of Ash Williams, except for the final season of Ash vs Evil Dead, which apparently closes the Necronomicon for good. It makes sense for Bruce Campbell to be done with the character after all these years, given all the pratfalls he has had to endure, but at least it will have cemented his status as a movie icon for at least two generations.

Also, the remake is not bad at all.



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